Hopper, Grace Murray (1906–1992)

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Hopper, Grace Murray (1906–1992)

Rear admiral, U.S. Naval Reserve, who pioneered computer technology for military and business applications and was a primary inventor of the standard computer language COBOL. Born Grace Brewster Murray in New York City on December 9, 1906; died on January 1, 1992, in Arlington, Virginia; daughter of Walter Fletcher Murray (an insurance broker) and Mary Campbell (Van Horne) Murray; Vassar College, B.A. in mathematics and physics, 1928; Yale University, M.A. in mathematics, 1930, Ph.D. in mathematics, 1934; married Vincent Foster Hopper, in 1930 (divorced 1945); no children.

Became teacher of mathematics at Vassar (1931); enlisted in U.S. Naval Reserve (December 1943); commissioned as a lieutenant (junior grade, June 1944); assigned to the Bureau of Ordnance Computation Project at Harvard University to work on the Mark I Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (1944); while working in private industry, developed COBOL computer language (1960); achieved rank of rear admiral (1985); retired from the navy (1986).

Shortly after June 27, 1944, when Lieutenant (junior grade) Grace Murray Hopper received her commission in the U.S. Naval Reserve, she paid a visit to the grave of her great-grandfather, who had been a U.S. admiral, to place a bouquet of flowers beside his headstone and tell him that it was "all right for females to be navy officers." At age 38, Hopper's commission as a member of the Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service (WAVES) had come at the end of a long struggle, begun shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, which had propelled the U.S. into full involvement in World War II. For one thing, she was considered over age; for another, as a professor of mathematics at Vassar College, she had what was thought to be a "crucial" civilian occupation. The diminutive Hopper also weighed only 105 pounds, and navy regulations required that WAVES weigh at least 121 pounds and stand 5′6". Professor Hopper got an exemption from the occupational restriction by threatening to resign from Vassar if she was not granted an extended leave of absence; then, showing the typical dedication and drive that marked her life, she maneuvered her way through a succession of waivers until December 1943, when she was finally sworn into the U.S. Naval Reserve. With her country at war, Hopper believed that her active military involvement was "the only thing to do."

Born in New York City on December 9, 1906, Grace Brewster Murray was enraptured by numbers from an early age. An avid reader, musician, and tinkerer, she dismantled an alarm clock at age seven, just to see how it worked. Her attitude toward overcoming all obstacles was largely attributable to her father, Walter Murray, who lost both legs due to hardening of the arteries but refused to succumb to self-pity. At a time when young girls rarely received extensive instruction or support in mathematics and science, Grace was also encouraged by her father to pursue the same educational path as her brother and to acquire job skills that would make her self-sufficient.

At Schoonmakers School in New York City, Grace excelled at athletics, particularly basketball, field hockey, and water polo. In the autumn of 1924, she entered Vassar College, where she was inspired by the convocation speech of Dean Mildred Thompson on "The Business of Being a Student." Grace was elected to the Phi Beta Kappa honor society and received a Vassar fellowship which relieved her family of the financial burden of her education. In 1930, she earned a Master of Arts degree in mathematics from Yale University and was inducted into Sigma Xi, the honor society which recognizes outstanding achievement in scientific research.

On June 15, 1930, Grace Murray married Vincent Foster Hopper, a Princeton honors graduate and instructor of English at New York University's School of Commerce, who eventually attained his doctorate in comparative literature from Columbia University. The couple moved to Poughkeepsie, New York, and settled into their separate academic careers. In 1931, Hopper's first teaching position was at her alma mater, at the annual salary of $800, and she would continue to teach mathematics at Vassar until 1943. In 1934, she accomplished the remarkable feat of earning a doctorate in mathematics from Yale, where only two doctorates per year were typically awarded in that field, and rarely to a woman. Before joining the navy, she was awarded another fellowship and taught briefly at Barnard College, the women's college of Columbia.

Hopper separated from her husband in the early 1940s, although the couple did not divorce until 1945. After her admission into the navy, she entered the U.S. Naval Reserve Midshipman's School for Women in Northampton, Massachusetts, early in 1944. Training of women officer candidates differed little from that of men in terms of discipline, drill, navy orientation, physical training, and the detection of enemy ships known as "platform recognition." Once she received her commission, Lieutenant Hopper was ordered to report to the Bureau of Ordnance Computation Project located at the Cruft Laboratory, at Harvard University, to work for Commander Howard Aiken on the new Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (ASCC), better known as the Mark I. Taken by the majesty of the 51-foot-long computer, Hopper called it "the prettiest gadget I ever saw." Although she also worked on later-generation computers, the Mark I was to remain her favorite; after it was retired to the Smithsonian Institution, she would go there to visit it.

Under Commander Aiken, Lieutenant Hopper was put to work calculating "coefficients for the interpolation of arc tangents." In the pre-industrial age, when naval battles were generally fought ship-on-ship and at close range, typically only a few hundred yards, the efficiency of naval gunnery had essentially been based on the speed and efficiency of a gun crew in loading and firing. In 20th-century naval warfare, ships became faster and more maneuverable platforms, carrying guns of larger calibre, capable of hurling conical projectiles at targets up to 24 miles away. The iron cannonball of the sailing ship era evolved into the ballistic missile fired off the modern warship, and the problems of controlling the firing became immensely more complicated. For the gun to be correctly elevated and trained on either a stationary shore target or a distant moving ship required the rapid calculation of factors such as wind speed, direction, temperature and density, the speed and course of both the gun-bearing ship and the target, as well as the weight of the shell, bearing, and target range. By World War I, the major naval powers had developed rudimentary analog computers to input data and output gun orders. In World War II, the Mark I represented a great advance in im proving the accuracy of firing tables and calculating such problems as the range capabilities of mine-sweeping detection gear towed behind ships and the simulation of shock waves created by an atomic blast.

Grace Murray Hopper">
A ship in port is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.
—Grace Murray Hopper

A joint project of Harvard University and International Business Machines (IBM), the Mark I was built at the IBM laboratory in Endicott, New York, and moved to the Cruft Lab where it was ready for operations by summer 1944. Driven by a four-horsepower motor powering its 800,000 parts, connected by 500 miles of wire, the computer involved 3,300 mechanical relays which were electrically driven, based on input provided by IBM punched key cards. It was the world's first large-scale digital computer, performing three additions per second, which speeded up human calculations by a factor of almost 200. Hopper described it as "man's first attempt to build a machine that would assist the power of his brain rather than the strength of his arm."

By the summer of 1945, the pioneer Mark I was being overtaken by the Mark II, the first large computer capable of multiprocessing, and five times faster than its predecessor. In the era before air-conditioning, when laboratory windows were left open on a hot summer day, the Mark II became the site of a legendary computer event when the machine suddenly stopped, and an investigation revealed a moth had been the cause when it was trapped and killed by an electromagnetic relay, giving birth to the computer term "debugging." The moth's remains have been preserved in the pages of the Mark II daily log book at the museum of the Naval Surface Weapons Center in Dahlgren, Virginia.

At Harvard, Hopper's work made her aware of a critical problem limiting the application of computer technology to widespread business and non-scientific use: the necessity of having advanced mathematicians to code, or program, the machines. Solving this problem was to become the driving force of the remainder of her career.

Although she loved teaching, Lt. Hopper had decided by the end of World War II that "computers were more fun," and she declined to return to Vassar. The number of women in the WAVES had reached its peak at 86,000, and she was well past the age limit of 38 for those seeking to transfer into the regular navy, but she was able to remain in the Naval Reserve and continued at the Harvard lab as a civilian employee in the position of research fellow in engineering sciences and applied physics. As a reserve officer, she completed several Naval War College courses which concentrated on tactical problems such as refueling a task force at sea, and others similarly suited to the new computer's capabilities. She worked on the development of the last two computers in the Harvard series, the Mark III and Mark IV. The Mark III, using vacuum tubes and magnetic tapes, increased its speed to 50 times that of the old Mark I, and was in service until 1955; the Mark IV proved three times faster than its immediate predecessor and was not outdated until 1962.

In 1949, Hopper left Harvard to join the pioneering computer firm of Eckert-Mauchly in Philadelphia as senior mathematician, and continued there until her official retirement in 1971. In 1951, when the firm's new Universal Automatic Computer, or UNIVAC I, replaced the punched card with high-speed tape coded to use simple alphabet instructions (A=add, M=multiply, C=clear), the modern computer had come into shape. In 1952, with the development of the Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer, or EDVAC, which implemented the binary system (using only 1 or 0), the same computing ability could occur with a greatly reduced number of vacuum tubes. EDVAC also stored the program for its instructions, and eliminated the need for punched tape or cards to carry the instructions for its sequence of operations, and the modern computer was born.

Still dissatisfied with the "non-user friendly" state of programming, Dr. Hopper became involved in developing a new system. In 1952, she produced her first compiler, called the A-0 System, which translated instructions from mathematical symbols input by an operator into machine code. By allowing the machine to "do the work," this system ended the need for the programmer to write in the complex machine code. In 1952, Hopper wrote a paper on compilers, the first of more than 50 in her career, leading to her promotion to systems engineer, director of automatic programming for Remington Rand, new owners of the company which would later be part of Sperry Corporation and renamed UNYSIS.

As advances in programming continued, Hopper intensified her efforts to create a simple programming language in English which a compiler would translate into machine code. By 1957, her B-0 compiler (B for business), called Flowmatic, had become one of the major programming tools in widespread use, employing simple word commands such as COUNT, DIVIDE, SUBTRACT, REPLACE, and MULTIPLY, but a universal programming language was still needed. Hopper continued to work on the English version.

In 1959, representatives at a joint meeting of members of the military, private business, and government sectors agreed on the shared goal of developing a standard business computer language. Near the end of the following year, Hopper's engineering team was ready to introduce COBOL, or Common Business Oriented Language, which allows simple English key words to program a computer in complex mathematical equations required of previous systems. On December 6, 1960, UNIVAC and RCA introduced their joint version of COBOL, demonstrated on the UNIVAC II and RCA 501 computers. Hopper, using finesse and diplomacy, presented complex engineering problems and solutions to management in simplified, understandable terms that ensured the broadbased support and funding for her future research and development projects, which were often on the cutting edge of technology. Soon COBOL was adopted as the U.S. Defense Department standard and, at the end of the 20th century, continued to be one of the most popular and adaptive business languages available.

In 1966, Hopper had reached the rank of commander in the reserves when she was notified that she must retire due to age. Only seven months after she had done so, in August 1967, she returned to "temporary" active duty, requested to standardize and promote usage of COBOL throughout the navy. Her six-month assignment, soon changed to "indefinite," was to last almost 20 years. In 1973, she reached the rank of captain.

As an adjunct member of the faculties of the University of Pennsylvania and George Washington

University, Hopper also continued to teach. Wearing her naval uniform, she presented more than 200 speeches a year, often to audiences of children, firing them with curiosity about science and technology, and challenging them to take risks. Her work earned her the navy's Legion of Merit in 1973, the Meritorious Service Medal in 1980, and the Distinguished Service Medal in 1986. In 1983, she was promoted to commodore, and, in 1985, when she became a rear admiral, the first female admiral in naval history, she advised friends in Philadelphia to keep a sharp eye on her great-grandfather's grave, as he might "rise from the dead."

Civilian honors also came her way in droves. In 1969, she was the first recipient of the Computer Science "Man-of-the-Year" award from the Data Processing Management Association, and in 1971, UNIVAC created the Grace Murray Hopper Award to honor a "significant contribution to computer science." In 1973, she was the first American to become a Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society. In 1984, she was inducted into the Engineering and Science Hall of Fame. Overall, she received more than 30 honorary doctorates.

Admiral Hopper's style was not to manage but to lead. Her accomplishments were due to her strong intellect and work ethic, as well as her dogged pursuit of the risky and uncharted track. She was willing to be bold and innovative, and persistence was a trait she constantly stressed, especially to young audiences. As a naval officer, she personified John Paul Jones' admonition that those who do not risk, "cannot win."

Hopper's greatest contribution in the development of programming languages extended beyond military and naval science to the broader worlds of commerce and industry. But as Admiral Hopper, when she accepted the British Computer Society Distinguished Fellowship, despite all her technological achievements, awards and acclaim, she noted, "I have already received the highest award, which is the honor and privilege of serving very proudly in the United States Navy."

sources:

Billings, Charlene W. Grace Hopper: Navy Admiral and Computer Pioneer. Hillside, NJ: Enslow Publishers, 1989.

Green, Laura. Computer Pioneers. NY: Franklin Watts, 1985.

Rausa, Rosario M. "Grace Murray Hopper," in Naval History. Vol 6, no. 3. Fall 1992, p. 58.

Wetzstein, Cheryl and Linda Joyce Forristal. "Grace Murray Hopper," in The World and I. August 1987.

Zientara, Marguerite. "Captain Grace M. Hopper and the Genesis of Programming Languages," in The History of Computing. Part 11. CW Communications, 1981, p. 51.